An Experience as Respectful as It Is Powerful

For some, it may be too soon to review the events of 9/11: The wounds are still raw, the consequences still unfolding, the issues still controversial. But a museum that devotes much of its space to honoring the fallen isn't a place for these issues to be debated.

In the 9/11 Memorial Museum visitors will come very close to experiencing (or re-experiencing) the events of Sept. 11, 2001, through video, sound clips, photos and artifacts that are shocking and heart-wrenching.

The museum has two somewhat incompatible aspirations. The nearly 3,000 people whose lives were lost are honored within an enclosure surrounded by the sawed-off rows of steel columns that supported the South Tower of the World Trade Center. A similar enclosure within the North Tower foundations tells the tragic story of the terror attacks, what led to them, and the recovery.

ENLARGE

Last Column in Foundation Hall
Jin Lee

Through a long and painful process, director Alice Greenwald and an enormous team of curators, conservators, advisers, exhibit designers and architects created an experience as respectful as it is powerful.

With more than 10,000 objects, 23,000 images and 500 hours of film and video, the 110,000-square-foot Memorial Museum opens with a collection and square footage to match many substantial museums. That's why the museum, along with the memorial, cost a staggering $700 million, requiring a $24 adult admission and a $60 million annual budget that's far from fully endowed. At such a scale, it cannot entirely avoid grandiosity.

A dark ramp that descends 70 feet to just above bedrock previews Foundation Hall, which looks from above like a cavernous half-lighted archaeological dig. (Thinc Design and Local Projects are the lead exhibition-design firms.) It is dominated by a 36-foot-high steel column that was the last to be removed from the site. It is covered with mementos placed by ironworkers, rescue personnel and others.

The historical exhibit begins the morning of Sept. 11 with voices—radio announcements, voice mails and television clips of people just becoming aware of the first attack. The exhibition, by Layman Design, takes each attack in turn: the two in New York, the Pentagon, the crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, and then looks back at the 1993 Trade Center bombing.

The exhibition is dense with hundreds of artifacts: uniforms, helmets, gloves, a melted telephone from the Pentagon. Along with the monumentally horrifying photos of flames and bent metal that have been ubiquitous since the event, you will find burned papers that fluttered through the air as the planes hit. Videos follow first responders heading into the towers. A security tape shows people pushed out of a building entrance by the dense cloud of debris propelled by one of the collapsing towers.

The exhibition does not stint on the day's most horrifying moments. You can hear voices of police officers and firefighters trying to help people while looking for a way out. You can look at photos of people jumping from the towers, accompanied by a quote from an onlooker who felt she had to bear witness in honor of people who had no choice. Not everyone will agree. Alcoves conceal this most disturbing material from visitors who want to avoid it. (It is certainly not for children.)

Thankfully, this is not the disaster-porn thrill ride contemplated at an early stage of the exhibit design. The real voices, photos and artifacts speak to the scale and monstrousness of the event with a physical force, yet in a humanized way.

Dispensers offer tissues because it is hard not to tear up.

The story of 9/11 lacks a grand, redemptive denouement, but the exhibition viscerally conveys enormous heroism and the generosity and selflessness of responders and volunteers, from the grim work of sifting ruins to the long lines of people waiting to give blood.

The story includes a sunny room devoted to the original World Trade Center. After what's come before, this reminder of the center's architectural mediocrity is pretty jarring, even though the Twin Towers have become much more iconic since their destruction.

In what many deem either a graveyard or sacred ground, the museum has taken the risk of glorifying the perpetrators by showing what led up to 9/11. The display includes a short film called "The Rise of Al Qaeda" that includes the propaganda footage used to recruit terrorists. This historical sketch is unsettling but essential if people are ever to thoughtfully consider the genesis of the events.

By the time the exhibition returned me to Foundation Hall, I had seen too much crumpled metal, even though the evidence of colliding forces exerts a primordial allure. The museum overindulges our fascination with ruin. Who cannot stare at a fire truck that's had its cab ripped away or an ambulance seared by fire? Some steel beams are so gorgeously twisted that they could take pride of place in an art museum.

A label told me that a plane had mangled the metal. I read of the heroism of the people who rode those destroyed vehicles and did not live. The stories keep the visitor inside the reality of the attacks, but the art-museum preciousness of the objects that take up the vastness of Foundation Hall comes too close to aestheticizing horror.

Casual visitors, many connoisseurs of the superrealistic carnage pumped out by Hollywood (like Godzilla whacking skylines as I write this), may decide that a shredded radio antenna whose operators died is the perfect place for a selfie. For others, the sheer emotional power of many of the artifacts may rekindle the blind rage inspired by the attacks.

After putting visitors through a manufactured hell, the museum can't convey the larger meaning of the day because the consequences of 9/11 are still unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. There cannot yet be an equivalent to the "never again" message of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The Museum mentions the lives committed to wars in terms of those who volunteered to honor lost loved ones. It invites visitors to ask their own questions and add their own comments.

Many of the decisions made in 9/11's name remain very controversial, and a museum that devotes much of its space to honoring the fallen and contains many of their remains can't be a place for these issues to be debated.

The spacious hall in the South Tower, called "In Memoriam," exhibits photos of the nearly 3,000 who died in the attacks, covering walls with their photos and projecting short biographical sketches one by one in a large darkened room.

Those stories are touching whether heroic or ordinary, but "In Memorium" makes too literal what is already beautifully evoked by the victims' names inscribed on the railings around the pools of the open-air Memorial. Those names (whose arrangement took a year to figure out), backdropped by flowing water, are what's most important in conjuring the tragedy of lives lost. Bigger is not better in this case.

Mr. Russell is an architecture critic and journalist. He is author of "The Agile City" (Island) and blogs at www.jamessrussell.net.

Indeed, a powerful reminder that a government - incapable of simplifying a tax code - can pull off one of history's most sinister atrocities on it's own people to satisfy the hunger of a military-industrial conspiracy that Eisenhower warned us about. Wake up.

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